


How "Avengers: Age of Ultron" Should Have Ended

by newtypeshadow



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Communication, Fix-It, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Hopeful Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:42:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23658553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newtypeshadow/pseuds/newtypeshadow
Summary: Tony's going to do it quietly—step down from the team and have Steve tell them he's no longer an active-duty Avenger—but Vision hears him telling Steve and Thor as they walk outside, and calls out, "I don't understand. Why are you leaving the Avengers after all that you've accomplished?"OR: An alternate ending toAvengers: Age of Ultron, wherein the team talks about why Tony's leaving, and facts are reiterated so that people pay attention.
Relationships: James "Rhodey" Rhodes & Tony Stark, Steve Rogers & Tony Stark, Tony Stark & Thor, Tony Stark & Vision
Comments: 38
Kudos: 267
Collections: Avengers as Family, marvel fics that are marvelous





	How "Avengers: Age of Ultron" Should Have Ended

**Author's Note:**

> The way Tony Stark left the team at the end of _Avengers: Age of Ultron_ (in shame, pretty much) never sat right with me. Nor was I pleased upon re-watch to realize the film explicitly absolves Tony (and Bruce!) of the guilt of Ultron's creation; the MCU's characters—Tony included—ignore that little factoid to the point that guilt about Ultron partially motivates Tony's pro-Accords stance in CACW, whereupon the team falls apart. Enter Thanos, etc., etc.
> 
> In conclusion: A lot of interpersonal stuff was left unresolved at the end of AoU. This fic was my way of addressing the things the MCU should have, but didn't.
> 
> Many thanks to [DWHPJSherlocked](/users/dwhpjsherlocked) and [ApatheticEntity](/users/ApatheticEntity) for betaing! Any mistakes you find are mine.

Tony's going to do it quietly—step down from the team and have Steve tell them he's no longer an active-duty Avenger—but Vision hears him telling Steve and Thor as they walk outside, and calls out, "I don't understand. Why are you leaving the Avengers after all that you've accomplished?"

Unfortunately for Tony, Vision is in the new and improved Avengers Compound common room with every other Avenger, new and old—except Bruce, who's gone.

Fled.

And now all those Avengers are looking at him: Nat, Clint, and Wanda from the far couch, Vision in half profile standing behind another, and Rhodey and Sam chatting over smoothies in the kitchen doorway.

"You're leaving?" Natasha asks, standing.

Wanda's face is very carefully neutral. Clint's displays his approval.

"Explain," Natasha says.

Steve motions Tony back into the common room, and Tony follows him with a sigh, hands jammed in his pockets to hide his clenching fists. Steve takes a seat on the arm of the couch Vision's standing behind. Thor hovers watchfully in the threshold archway to Tony's left. If nothing else, Tony feels reassured by his and Rhodey's presence—even though Thor choked him out only days ago, when Ultron reared his head. At least he had Tony's back with Vision, which means a lot.

"You're leaving?" Natasha prompts again, and resumes her seat, studying him the way she used to, like he's potentially faulty code in a malfunctioning server.

"Seems like the thing to do," Tony says, affecting a carelessness he doesn't feel. It's been so long since he had to use press face with this group it almost feels unnatural. In any case, it hurts that he knows he has to, knows he probably always did. "When you nearly cause a worldwide extinction event, it's time to tap out." At Vision's dubious look, he clarifies, "Ultron," though he really shouldn't have to.

"You're leaving because you created Ultron?" Vision says, surprisingly uncomprehending, in JARVIS's beloved voice; and that hurts too.

"Yep." Tony nods and purses his lips, rocks on his heels and glances around the room without meeting anyone's eyes.

"But you did _not_ create Ultron," Vision says, still confused. "The Mind Stone did."

Tony's eyes, like everyone else's, shoot to Vision. "What?"

"Did no one realize?" Vision asks the room.

"I told them when you were created," Thor insists.

Tony reels around. "You did?"

"Of course," Thor says. "There was much going on at the time, I admit, but I did explain why it was best to have Vision and the Mind Stone on our side."

"But… Tony made Ultron," Steve says hollowly. "With Bruce."

Vision raises an eyebrow, and asks him, kindly, but with the brand of sass Tony programmed JARVIS to have and JARVIS ran with beautifully, "How?"

"Well, he… He makes A.I.s. He was _trying_ to make Ultron."

Tony feels the memory of the moments after Ultron emerged, the team’s accusations, like bile on the back of his tongue. He'd told them it wasn't possible—he knew his stuff—it shouldn't have been possible, but he'd trusted their judgment more than his own and accepted blame for the creation of the monster who'd murdered JARVIS and emerged from his lab on the warpath.

"Mr. Stark and Dr. Banner _must_ have informed you Ultron's creation was impossible," Vision says.

"I did," Tony whispers. "Our algorithms were nowhere near capable of creating a consciousness—definitely not in that timeframe. We were _years_ away from success."

Vision nods. "That is correct." To the rest of the team, who didn't understand Tony's explanation when he tried to give it days ago, Vision explains, "If Ultron were a human, Mr. Stark and Dr. Banner supplied an empty womb and nothing more. The Mind Stone, left unattended, used it to grow and birth a child who it designed to hate mankind, just as it did. Mr. Stark's only fault in Ultron's creation lies in his ignorance of the Mind Stone's capabilities—but that is an ignorance and a negligence you all shared equally at the time."

"But why did it want him to hate humanity?" Sam asks.

Vision frowns for a moment, as if searching his mind—minds, really—for the answer. "You recovered the scepter from Hydra, did you not? Hydra experimented on the stone and used its power to enhance humans like the Maximoff twins. Ms. Maximoff's powers were born of the Mind Stone's suffering, and all volunteers but the Maximoffs were killed during Hydra's attempts to control it. That was the Mind Stone's experience of humanity: torture, death, hatred, and violation. That is why it amplified Mr. Stark's drive to create Ultron after his vision: it wanted its own Avenger, if you will."

"Tony and I didn't have visions," Clint says firmly.

"No," Tony says slowly, eyes fixing on Wanda, because he _knew_ , he'd known it the moment the team talked about theirs on the comms and Bruce went crazy. He _knew_ where his vision of failure, the death of his friends, and the end of the earth had come from the day they recovered the scepter. "I had the first one. At Strucker's base in Sokovia. A bad one, like you gave Bruce—not like the ones you gave them. You only wanted to distract them. But us? You wanted us to _act_ on what we saw."

Now the room shifts focus to Wanda. She holds out for a few cautious moments, then sighs and leans back with mutinous resignation. She's undeniably an adult, but right now she looks like a kid to Tony, with that unrepentant face and sprawl, and he's ashamed that a _kid_ managed to so utterly destroy his friend and their relationship with the team—if that's what they really were.

"Fine," Wanda says. "Your visions were different. But I am not responsible for what you did with them."

"You made Bruce believe he was a _monster_ ," Tony growls before he can rein in his flash of temper. "He had the Hulk under control until he ran into _you_ , and now he's gone. He attacked civilians with no provocation—Hulk doesn't do that! He was non-verbal when he nearly destroyed Johannesburg. _Non-verbal_. I've never seen him that bad before." Tony crosses his arms, shifting angrily.

Natasha looks troubled. She's good at hiding it, but Tony is better at reading her.

Rhodey's eyes narrow. He puts down his smoothie and crosses his arms too, posture mirroring Tony's in an unconscious show of support. "Isn't the Stark Relief Foundation footing the bill for rebuilding Johannesburg and all the medical care for the people Hulk injured in that vision-induced attack?" he asks mildly. "Come to think of it, doesn't Tony foot the bill for _all_ Avengers-related damages?"

Steve looks distinctly uncomfortable. So does Sam, though it's not guilt so much as finding himself in the middle of a domestic dispute he shouldn't be part of.

"Seems like the person who set off the bomb should pay for what's damaged in the blast," Rhodey says.

Wanda scoffs. "I don't have that kind of money."

"None of you do," Rhodey says sharply, "but I don't see you offering what you _do_ have to help out anyway."

"It's fine," Tony says, even though it's not fine, it's just something he's used to and accepted: the people he thinks of as friends are only using him for money.

"It's not," Rhodey grumbles, and crosses the room to stand staunchly at Tony's right. The look he casts Tony is kind, yet intense, the look he always gets when they have this conversation about why it's not okay for people to use Tony for his money, as though that's all he's worth, and Tony is grateful to him but doesn't want to have that discussion in front of his former team.

Besides, he may not have been responsible for Ultron like he thought, but Tony still doesn't trust Wanda. She was a Hydra volunteer and she hates him, blames him for her family's horrible deaths.

Rhodey picks up on his discomfort because Rhodey always does, and releases Tony from his gaze only to pin it on Wanda. "What kind of vision did you give my friend?"

"Wanda?" Steve presses when she doesn't answer.

She only replies when Clint gives her a stern, fatherly look, emotion thickening her Sokovian accent. "I wanted him to feel fear. The all-consuming fear I felt hiding with my brother for two days, waiting for his bomb to go off and kill us like it did our family. I knew with that kind of fear, he would use the scepter to destroy himself soon enough." She's glaring at Tony by the end of her confession.

He feels old looking at her, and tired. He's heard all this before. His legacy as the Merchant of Death will carry him into his own; some days he's sure of it.

"You do realize he's the reason Sokovia isn't a crater that destroyed the world, right?" Rhodey asks testily.

"We are _all_ the reason Sokovia is not a crater that destroyed the world," Wanda snaps back.

"You were on Ultron duty, not Sokovia duty. Wasn't there a core you were supposed to be guarding that got activated anyway?"

"Let's not do this," Steve says. "We're a team, and we acted as a team. We stopped Ultron together. Let's just leave it at that."

"The U.S. military hasn't launched a strike against Sokovia for more than two decades," Rhodey says, changing tacks, "and Tony only knowingly sold weapons to the U.S. military, and isn't responsible for what we do with them anyway. Doesn't it make more sense for you to hate whoever _actually_ bombed your family? I don't go after bullet manufacturers just 'cause somebody shoots me with one."

"Rhodes," Clint says.

"You blamed Tony because he's a convenient target, just like the rest of you blamed Tony for Ultron even though you don't know the first thing about robotics and A.I. technology." Rhodey fumes and turns to Tony. "That's why you're really leaving, isn't it."

Tony attempts to school his expression, but he can see in his periphery that Natasha read the truth on his face.

"You're leaving because of us," she says.

Steve looks gutted. "Tony?"

Tony sighs. "Look, I don't like getting mindfucked any more than Clint does," he says, "and if scarlet witch over there wants to do it again I don't see how any of you can stop her."

Wanda looks smug enough that Vision shakes his head at her in disappointment—which does more to chasten her than almost everything said up to this point, strangely enough.

"I also don't like that the only person who believed and supported me about Ultron and making Vision just dropped off the face of the earth to protect it." At the ashen faces around him, Tony feels compelled to add, "You're all great people and we did good work together, and I'll keep making you stuff and bankrolling the Avengers, but I can't stay here. And I know you don't trust me. So…" He shrugs. "Active duty non-combatant. Glorified consultant."

"That's not true," Steve says, eyes glassy and voice raw. "We trust you."

"When it's convenient."

"Jesus, Tony."

"Look," Tony huffs, "I didn't want to have _any_ of this conversation. My plan was to bow out and leave quietly, but you all wanted to know why, and you pushed, so now you know."

"There is something I still do not understand," Thor says, speaking up for the first time. His face is grave, but his voice is gentle. "Vision can pick up my hammer, and so he is worthy. But you must be more Ultron and Mind Stone than JARVIS, and both of them seek to destroy mankind. How then are you _good?_ "

Vision smiles. It's a wondering, foreign expression on his face, but it suits him, and he seems delighted that he can feel pleasure. Tony is too. It reminds him of JARVIS, and makes him proud at Vision's tremendous growth so soon after his creation—the way all Tony's A.I.s make him proud when they exceed his programming and expectations. Vision looks over at him with surprising fondness. "JARVIS was created with affection and care by Mr. Stark to help him and support his endeavors, and Mr. Stark's endeavors have always been the protection and betterment of mankind. Even absent of his memory, JARVIS's core remained as his creator designed it—and I have since recovered much of what Ultron sought to erase. The Mind Stone, for a brief period of time, was shown humanity at its worst. But JARVIS's protracted and thorough experience with Mr. Stark, and his perspective, have proven invaluable to the pieces of me that are Ultron and the Mind Stone. I am able to see the many faults in humanity while also recognizing its value, and feel the desire to nurture and preserve what is good. In sum," he turns to Thor, "what is worthy in me was created by Mr. Stark."

Thor smiles broadly. "I see."

The pleased look he casts Tony then makes him suspect Thor was never confused at all, and his heart warms with this subtle show of support and faith.

"Until we meet again, my friends," Thor tells the room at large.

"That's my cue," Tony says, as unobtrusively as he can, glad that Thor's shifted the attention to himself.

"See you later, Tones," Rhodey says, and pulls him into a hug. A bear hug, a supportive 'I'm with you' hug, the kind Tony knows is increasing the danger that he'll cry, especially after what Vision said about him and JARVIS.

"Later, Samwise," Tony tells Rhodey, clapping his best friend on the back before pulling away.

He's surprised to find Natasha hugging him almost immediately after. "I hope you reconsider," she says quietly, but lets him go when he steps back.

Clint nods at him from the couch. "Well, looks like three of us are leaving then." At the room's shock, he confesses, "I want to spend more time with my family. Now that SHIELD's gone, and Ultron's dead, and the scepter's taken care of, I can finally do that."

Tony ducks out with Thor while the focus is on Clint; they'd already said their goodbyes before Vision called them back in.

"I'll walk you out," Steve says quietly and slips out with them.

There's a very different atmosphere between them from when they walked this hallway ten minutes ago: somber and pensive, where before it was light and fond. There's still affection, Tony can feel it in the easy way Thor walks beside him and in Steve's aura of guilt, but he doesn't know what he's going to do when Thor leaves him alone at his car with Steve, and that makes him nervous.

"I still can't lift the hammer," he says, trying to break the uncomfortable tension between them. Well, between him and Steve, who physically put Thor between them for this walk of shame. That smarts.

"Me neither," Steve joins in, glancing furtively at him.

It hurts that Steve seems afraid to meet his eyes. Afraid, or unworthy.

"Perhaps it is only a matter of time," Thor says magnanimously, twirling the hammer in his giant hand.

The sound it makes when it moves always reminds Tony a little of the arc reactor's hum. He grins a little. He doesn't miss having it crushed into his chest, and he _certainly_ doesn't miss always feeling short of breath, but its blue light became a comfort to him over the years, proof he was still alive and the world hadn't ground him into dust—not yet, anyway.

"Yeah, about that," Steve says. "I don't think it counts that Vision can move the hammer and we can't. He's a machine, not a person."

Tony doesn't protest Steve's postulation; it's basically true, even though Vision's technically a synthetic person. He instead lets himself be distracted. This, at least, is fun. This is the way he and Steve are when there's no mission to come between them and make them butt heads. "Yeah," he agrees, even though he doesn't actually. "There are different rules for us flesh and blood folk." It does rankle his pride that Vision can lift the hammer and he can't—but the rest of the team can't either, and Tony's sure if Jarvis were alive and tried to lift it, it would move for him as sweetly and easily as can be, which makes him feel gratified that his A.I. of JARVIS can too.

"If he can wield the hammer, he can keep the Mind Stone," Thor says, missing the point in favor of focusing on his upcoming information-seeking mission. "It's safe with the Vision, and these days, safe is in short supply."

After a few moments of actual companionable silence, Steve says, "But if you put the hammer in an elevator…"

"It would still go up," Tony finishes.

"Elevator's not worthy."

Thor laughs at their antics. "I'm going to miss these little talks of ours."

"Not if you don't leave," Tony can't help saying.

But even before Thor says it, Tony knows he has to go. The Infinity Stones are far too great a power to be left unsupervised and unchecked, and the Avengers can't afford to be blindsided by them again. If the Mind Stone was capable of manipulating all of them, creating Ultron, and giving people literal magical powers, then they need to know everything about it—and its five equally powerful siblings.

He wishes Thor luck on his vision quest, and Thor drags him into a hearty hug, basically calls him the only unexplainable thing in the universe—as a _compliment_ , which is _awesome_ —and then wrecks his lawn with Bifrost burn in a pattern Tony wonders if Steve will end up drawing at some point. "That man has _no_ regard for lawn maintenance," he says as if he cares. "I'm gonna miss him though. And you're gonna miss me. There's gonna be a lot of manful tears." He's hamming it up and doesn't believe either of those things are actually true, but it's a nice thought.

"I _will_ miss you, Tony," Steve says, earnest and painfully matter-of-fact. Then, more gently, "I'm not happy I'm one of the reasons you don't feel safe here, with the team." He huffs and looks down, then seems to make a concerted effort to look Tony in the eye. "I reacted badly with Ultron and Vision. And I'm sure other things as well. I'm sorry."

The apology is wholly unexpected, and Tony swallows and hits the key fob on his car so it can come rescue him. "Well, at least you didn't choke me," he says blithely. "I've got _another_ set of Asgardian fingerprints on my throat right now." At Steve's confused squint, he points out the places that are still a constant throbbing ache and explains, "Makeup, if you can believe it. I'm good at hiding bruises."

Steve sucks in a breath and reaches for his neck, but doesn't quite make contact. " _Jesus_ , Tony."

Tony shrugs and takes a step toward the road, where his car is leisurely driving up to him. "Part of being Iron Man. Retiring's gonna save me _so_ much time in the mornings, let me tell you."

"That's terrible."

"True though."

Steve sighs as Tony reaches for his door. "Is it bad that even knowing that, I still wish you'd stay? The world needs Iron Man. So do we."

It's touching, but, "No you don't—you've got Rhodey." Rhodey's always been a better person than Tony. Steve and Natasha will see that soon, if they haven't already.

"Rhodes is good, but he isn't you."

Tony opens his door and slides into the car. "That's kinda the point, isn't it?"

Steve rests his hand on top of the door before Tony can close it. "I know you don't trust me anymore," he says, looking achingly vulnerable, "but I hope we can still be friends. And that you'll visit when you can. And Tony… If you ever change your mind about the team, there will always be a place here for you. Always."

It takes a moment to recover from the surge of affection and pain and hope and gratefulness that sucks Tony down like undertow at Steve's naked sincerity. He stares at the steering wheel and blinks back the lot of manful tears that suddenly burn his eyes, and takes a deep breath or few the way he learned at PT after he finally got the arc reactor removed. When he feels like he's got a handle on himself again, he looks up at Steve—and can't help grinning, just a little. He loves Steve, and the team, even if it's not reciprocated, not the way he needs, and that's not going to change. And although his grin is small, it's all him—no press face this time. "Thanks, Cap," he says with genuine warmth. "I'll keep that in mind."

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! If you were entertained, I hope you'll let me know via kudos and comments! They help give me a feel for what people like reading in my fics. Also, getting them makes me really happy. ^_^


End file.
